RedHat is looking to address a real problem: RHEL is unsuitable for fast moving cloud ecosystems. Its release cadence puts it years behind the essential new capabilities are introduced into the world of cloud. By introducing containers, RedHat is looking to create a smaller and faster moving core, while keeping its old OS for legacy apps.

While elegant and wise marketing move for RedHat itself (that will most definitely improve agility and performance of workloads), it does not solve the fundamental disconnect between the RedHat's desire to impose its operating system as a standard for OpenStack, and the community's need to have its own Linux kernel that is developing at the same pace as OpenStack itself.

Great discussion with no obvious answer to RHat Container good or Container bad

When VMware first offered server virtualization the more advanced users among us were having some of these same debates (was VMware the company, was the tech real, was it not just recycled mainframe tech?). The reality is its too early to tell whether RHAT containers will be either the company or technology winner. However, what I will postulate is that this technology is an elegant midway technology to fill the gap between legacy virtualization and what's next (a better OS?). The fact is most virtualization (especially after all the extras are added) becomes to expensive, top heavy or both. I see the future of virtualized environments as more closely mirroring HPC environments, as its a natural progression from where most of us are today. In the HPC(ish) world the ability to use a lighter more cost effective solution like containers will likely have a very strong appeal to many. If I have to prognosticate further I'd say that the biggest risk to RHAT is more likely that an alternative h/w abstraction solution will arise before containers have gained a big enough foot hold to be considered the defacto solution a la VMware.

Piston founder, CTO Joshua McKenty summarizes pros, cons of Docker containers in a set of slides, liink below in his perceptive comments. Thanks for additional light shed by Jonathan Feldman, CIO of City of Ashville, N.C., and Joe Emison, CTO of BuildFax in discussion below. Joe points out drawbacks of containers, says they favor systems admin over developers. I still lean in, Joe. Thanks to Rich Wolski, founder, CTO, Eucalyptus, who got this debate going with points on strengths/weaknesses of virfual machines vs. containers. Rich gives tip of hat to remarks by CTO Brian Stevens at Red Hat Summit, concluded Thursday. Enomaly founder in Toronto, Reuven Cohen, not too impressed with containers; he's now top tech advocate, Citrix. Glad to see TeaPartyCitizen join in and don't forget Andrew Binstock, editor of Dr. Dobb's, all below. I know there are others who want to join this debate, please do so. Ah, Alex Freedland, CEO of Mirantis, did so. Thanks!

Josh-- I agree with what you're saying, but you do gloss over the fact that developers favor "working" over "beautiful interfaces". The challenge with Docker and PaaS is that you end up having to spend a lot of time shoehorning configurations into them, and the "interface" becomes more of a blockade to functionality than an asset. (For trivial applications, this is not an issue, but developers generally aren't working with trivial applications).

I put together a slide deck on Docker for some of our investors and partners a few months back, and it's been useful in clarifying the confusion between containers (an infrastructure technology), Docker (a unified user experience around lightweight and introspected configuration management of containers), and various PaaS options (which deal with the myriad environment details of running multi-server applications, including scaling and upgrades).

People (whether they're so-called Developers or SysAdmins, an increasingly blurry line) don't use software - they use interfaces. And the Docker interfaces are beautiful. At least when you're getting started.

Whether Red Hat can, through any amount of either honest contribution or grandstanding, convince developers that the best way to consume either containers or PaaS (or VMs, for that matter) is to buy RHEL, remains to be seen.

To the best of my knowledge, no significant IT disruption has been succesfully commercialized by the legacy vendors it disrupted. This is why Red Hat is the major Linux vendor, instead of IBM or Microsoft. It's why most folks buy Hadoop from Hortonworks or Cloudera.

Is PaaS an important and transformative IT disruption? Absolutely.

Are containers likely to play a part in that story? I'd give it even odds.

Will a legacy OS vendor such as Red Hat or Microsoft become a dominant player in the PaaS space? History tells us that it's unlikely.

This is classic "think like a sysadmin". In the AWS world, I can have as many boxes as I want right now. Why is the "box" a limiting factor? If you're talking about "how many different environments on a physical machine", you're already losing to AWS. The box doesn't matter. What matters is enabling the developers.

Using containers is the only way of putting Dev, QA, SIT and Production on the same box. There is no configuring of a machine. With Docker it is bare metal provisioning. One writes a script to provision the machine from bare metal. No hokus pokus. The company is no longer truck sinsitive. It's infrastructure as code. No heavy hypervisers, no loading of an OS and no redundant resources. Containers make life simpler for developers and DevOps. I could even be the differenciation which Linux needs.

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